Sequester Watch, #18

August 19th, 2013 at 10:36 am

You might figure that as the sequester goes on, it would become the new normal and we’d see less reporting about its negative impacts on Head Start, scientific and medical research, low-income housing, and more. But you’d be wrong about that, in no small part due to the broad swath of journalists who, to their great credit, continue to follow the story.

BTW, note the oped from highly conservative commentator George Will about the sequetration-induced damage to NIH’s research agenda, though as Jon Chait points out, he’s new to this position. As numerous pieces below note, the institute’s budget hit this year alone amounts to $1.7 billion out of a budget of around $30 billion.

Friends, colleagues, opponents, anyone who’s listening: it is neither Head Start, nor NIH, nor low-income housing that are driving our deficits, which, btw, are falling quickly–I’d say too quickly–in the near term anyway. Yet the conventional wisdom is that when we hit the end of the fiscal year at the end of next month, the sequester will be built into whatever patch Congress and the White House agree upon to avoid a shutdown.

It’s like the worst aspects of group-think multiplied by $1.2 trillion.